Ola Mustapha
In Conversation
This week we spoke to Ola Mustapha about her debut novel Other Names, Other Places, a story about a young woman who finds herself caught between cultures.
Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.
NA: Can you walk us through your journey to publishing? When would you say the writing seed was planted?
OM: Writing went hand in hand with reading for me. I struggled with reading at first, but once I got hooked on Enid Blyton (around age six), words became much easier to absorb, and that’s when I started writing my own stories. Like many people, I stopped doing creative stuff when I left school and no longer had a framework for it, but the writing bug got me again about ten years ago, during a reading retreat run by School of Life. As part of the activities, we had to do some writing exercises, which reminded me how much I used to enjoy creative writing. Soon after this, I started writing again. Other Names, Other Places was the second novel I wrote, but the first I submitted to agents. After the obligatory round of rejections, I submitted it directly to Fairlight Books, who, to my immense gratitude, decided to publish it.
NA: A lot of times we’re waiting for permission to fully express our creativity. When did you realise you could build a life around your art, and more specifically, when did writing become something you could actively pursue as a career? Were you inspired by any particular authors?
OM: I have a full-time job, but write whenever I can. Writing is a key pillar of my life. It’s one of the most liberating feelings, losing yourself in a world that you’ve created but also takes on a life of its own. One pivotal moment for me was reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith when it first came out. It felt amazing that someone could write a book — a real, published book! — about themes and settings that were so familiar to me. This made me realise that we can all mine our lives for inspiration, however mundane the source material might be.
NA: Moving on to your debut novel, how did this story come to you? Did you have a broad theme in mind or did the characters come first?
OM: Other Names, Other Places actually grew out of the first novel I wrote, which was a futuristic/dystopian story. I never managed to get it to hang together, but it contained similar threads about immigration, identity and belonging. Someone who read it suggested that this was the story I really wanted to write, so I did — this time setting it in the real world, where I didn’t have to worry about questions like ‘Would people who have been transformed into immortal beings still need to go to the toilet?’
NA: Hahaa. I love that, I also really liked this line - What were we, then, if 'English' was a prize out of our reach and 'Tunisian' was the mask we wore at home? - it’s something many in the diaspora can relate to. Why was cultural identity something you wanted to explore in this way?
OM: Yes, I think many children of immigrants can relate to that conflict — the difference between the person we have to be at home to keep the peace, and the face we have to present to the outside world in order to ‘belong’. This topic was close to my heart, as I certainly struggled to navigate that divide when I was growing up — hence my interest in placing my protagonist in a similar bind.
NA: At one point Nessie moves to Japan, and I know you studied Japanese at university. In what ways does this book and these characters reflect your personal experiences and interests.
OM: Like Nessie, I also lived in Japan for a few years. Nessie’s time there brings home the difference between her privileged experience as an ‘expat’ and her parents’ experience as ‘immigrants’. This storyline was based on my own observations while living in Japan (though it doesn’t do justice to the hierarchy that exists even among ‘expats’.) I could’ve chosen to send Nessie somewhere else entirely, but Japan seemed logical given its familiarity to me — it also served the function of giving Nessie a freedom she wouldn’t enjoy if she was living somewhere closer to home. Imagine the threat of spontaneous visits from family if they were only a short (and cheap) plane-ride away …
NA: You’re from Egypt but you wrote about a family from Tunisia which I found really intriguing. Why were you drawn to specifically exploring Tunisian culture? Is it a culture you were already very familiar with or did it require an extra layer of research?
OM: One of the reasons I made Nessie’s family Tunisian was because I wanted them to be ‘unicorns’ even among other North Africans or Arabs, adrift from any sense of diaspora community. At the time the book was set, it seems there were very few Tunisians living in the UK. I have some Tunisian ancestry myself, but not in any living generation, so I relied on an extra layer of research for the smattering of dialect throughout the book.
NA: Are there any key takeaways you want your readers to walk away with after reading this book?
OM: I would love them to walk away with a sense that none of the characters are straightforward heroes or villains. Nessie, flawed and obnoxious as she is, has a clear sense of her own shortcomings. Her sister, Sherine, is kind, brave and instinctively moral, but also has a real bossy streak. Their father, an indisputably difficult man, genuinely loves his daughters and is struggling with the burden of presenting his own mask to the outside world. ‘Shades of grey’ is how I would summarise the key takeaway, if I had to condense it to a single phrase.
NA: Can you talk us through the writing process - once you had the idea for this book, how did you even start? What was your approach?
OM: My approach was pretty scattergun — after attempting to write the story in chronological order, I found myself caught in what felt like an endless loop of rewriting the first few chapters. At that point, I gave up and just wrote the different scenes as they appeared in my head — the ending came long before the middle. It took umpteen drafts to get the novel into any kind of coherent form, but I think that’s the only way I would’ve ever finished it.
Writing in general comes in bursts for me. I have long patches — months or even years — when I think I’ll never have another idea again, followed by phases when all I want to do is write: in trains, in supermarket queues, while walking in the street. I write in Word on my phone, which makes the process much more portable than working on a laptop. At some point in every writing project, I get stuck and need to do something completely different to get the wheels turning again. Watching films and documentaries or reading biographies often helps. Physical activity too — walking, swimming, anything that clears the head.
NA: And finally, if you could give one piece of advice to aspiring authors, what would it be?
OM: Don’t worry about perfection with your first draft — just get the story down and polish it later. That could be the difference between ending up with a whole book versus three beautifully written but lonely chapters.
Ola Mustapha was born in London and spent part of her childhood living in Egypt, before returning to England. She studied economics and Japanese at university and then moved to Japan, where she taught English for several years. She now lives in London and works as an editor. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals including Aesthetica, Storgy and Bandit Fiction. Other Names, Other Places is her debut novel.
You can read an excerpt of Other Names, Other Places here.
